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Bob Forrest is known for a lot of things in Carlsbad, a quiet city of 25,000 on the edge of New Mexico’s empty, endless Chihuahuan Desert. He was mayor here for 16 years. He’s chairman of the local bank and owns the spanking new Fairfield Inn, which sits next to the new Chili’s and the new Wal-Mart. And he helped bring 200,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste to town.

That’s not a bad thing—at least not here. Unlike thousands of other places in America, where the thought of trucking in barrels of radioactive garbage from atomic weapons plants would lead to marches, face paint and, invariably, pandering politicians (witness Nevada’s stalled Yucca Mountain project), Carlsbad has a different take. “It’s really a labor of love,” says Forrest. “We’ve proven that nuclear waste can be disposed of in a safe, reliable way.”

This attitude—“Yes in my backyard,” if you will—has brought near permanent prosperity to this isolated spot that until recently had no endemic economic engine. Unemployment sits at 3.8%, versus 6.5% statewide and 8.5% nationally. And thanks to this project—euphemistically known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP—New Mexico has received more than $300 million in federal highway funds in the past decade, $100 million of which has gone into the roads around Carlsbad. WIPP is the nation’s only permanent, deep geologic repository for nuclear waste. The roads have to be good for the two dozen trucks a week hauling in radioactive drums brimming with the plutonium-laden detritus of America’s nuclear weapons production.

Before WIPP the area’s economy was mostly limited to potash mining, oil and gas drilling, and a passel of tourists stopping on the way to ­Carlsbad Caverns, an hour south. The Department of Energy’s $6 billion program created 1,300 permanent jobs, many of them high-paid engineering positions. Energy’s annual budget for WIPP is $215 million, much of which stays in the community as wages. The leaders of neighboring Lea and Eddy counties have doubled down on the nuke biz, establishing a 1,000-acre atomic industrial park. ­Already uranium fuel maker Uren­co Group has built a $3 billion fabrication plant there, employing 300. More amenities followed, too: In November Carlsbad ­inaugurated the Bob Forrest Youth Sports Complex. “We are not blinded by the jobs,” says John Waters, director of the department of economic development for Eddy County. “We know what we have. We know the risks. We have a very educated public.”

But if Carlsbad’s story showcases the upside of being willing to do the nation’s dirty work, it also demonstrates how difficult it can be to get the chance to do so. Since opening in 1999, WIPP has operated so smoothly and safely that Carlsbad is lobbying the feds to ­expand the project to take the nuclear mother lode: 160,000 more tons of the worst high-level nuclear waste in the country—things like the half-melted reactor core of Three Mile Island and old nuclear fuel rods—that are residing at aging nuke plants a short drive from wherever you’re sitting right now.

Yet thanks to politics even more radio­active than the material itself, it hasn’t happened yet and might not happen anytime soon. Though taxpayers have already spent some $12 billion mining out and engineering Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas, power brokers in Nevada fought the congressionally approved project from the get-go. Bowing to Nimby—and Nevada’s powerful Senator Harry Reid—two years ago President Barack Obama’s Administration declared Yucca DOA. Contractors have since laid off some 1,000 workers there.

To seek some common ground Obama then set up the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. The BRC, as it’s known, is tasked with looking at all the options. It likes WIPP—a lot. According to its draft report last summer the BRC will insist that a “consent-based approach” be applied to any future site selection. WIPP, it wrote, is a model of how that can be done.

Cue the politics. New Mexico, in agreeing to WIPP, required that Congress enshrine in law a promise that the feds would not send high-level waste into the state. WIPP won’t be the next Yucca unless that issue is wrangled, and reversed, by Albuquerque, Washington or anyone else with skin in the game. If they pay any attention, that is. “I’m absolutely incredulous that so few opinion makers even know that WIPP exists,” says former New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, who sits on the BRC and is a friend of Forrest.

Still, science appears to be on the boosters’ side. Carlsbad has a Goldilocks geology that is the best solution yet found for entombing nuclear waste safely. Yucca Mountain’s volcanic tuff is prone to cracks and faults from seismic activity, which might, over thousands of years, let water seep in. Salt, on the other hand, is nearly impervious to seismic activity, quickly healing any cracks or faults and remaining completely impermeable—with no way for any water to get in or for any radiation to escape. Carlsbad sits atop the biggest salt deposit in America, stretching from New Mexico clear to Kansas. It was deposited 250 million years ago in the Permian period, when the seas receded from the shore of the ancient continent Pangea. The salt has lain undisturbed ever since.

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Where on Earth did you get that number from? After five years in a water-filled pool, used LWR fuel can be put into a shielded canister cooled only by ambient air circulation.

“a reprocessing plant, which would take the 95% of energy still left in old rods and turn it into new ones.”

Not quite, unless Integral Fast Reactors (a project killed by Bill Clinton and John Kerry in 1994) are involved.

“tiny volumes of ultrabad waste that could be devastating in the wrong hands”

You mean for so-called “dirty bombs”? The explosives would harm people more than the radioactive contaminants. Anyway, the bad guys would get this from medical, sterilization, or radiography sources, not reprocessing plants.

“Science must be the decision maker.”

Yeah, but the media need to educate themselves enough to know how to report it properly.

As for the ultimate economic incentive, the people of Carlsbad should simply be allowed them to take title to the used LWR fuel.

In ten years, after the ideologically-driven push for unreliable and inefficient renewables has passed, and society realizes that the only way to curb emissions and supply a growing worldwide population is through the use of Generation IV nuclear reactors, this material will be seen not as waste, but as a ready-made stockpile of fuel capable of generating decades worth of electricity.

But first we have to educate the public, change the paradigm, and start calling things what they really are – a nearly inexhaustible fuel supply, rather than “nuclear waste”. http://www.monbiot.com/2011/12/05/a-waste-of-waste

I used to work for an oil exploration company in the Permian basin that specialized in seismic surveys. Been all over this area.

It’s remote. It’s got a stable geology. And anybody who lives out in the middle of nowhere tend to be pretty tough people to begin with. If this does have some long term effect we’ve overlooked, I believe the technology of the future will have some way to deal with it.

I’m not a big fan of nuclear energy for the fact the waste is so toxic. But at the same time, I don’t want to train guinea pigs to row a tiny little boat either.

It’s not widely known that since 1995 highly enriched uranium from over 18,000 surplus Soviet warheads has been downblended into fuel for American power reactors, providing 10% of this country’s electricity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

A MOX (Mixed Oxide) plant being constructed in South Carolina will do the same thing to 3.5 tons of plutonium warheads annually: http://www.moxproject.com

This is the best way to efficiently utilize, and destroy once and for all, aging Cold War bombs – a modern technological version of the biblical imperative to beat swords into plowshares.

It is hard to speak about safety when there is no track record to base any kind of statistical predictions on. The safety aspect is still pretty much conjecture. The concern about trucking high level radioactive waste on public roads seems fully justified to me. Trucks can be pretty safe for moving things—trains even safer. However, we KNOW from experience, get enough trucks and trains on the move with hazardous loads, and sooner or later you WILL have accidents.

A salt dome is considered a safe bet from a seismic and geologic point of view—and that is probably true.

However, what happens when you bury high level radioactive waste in a salt dome?

I don’t know, it has never been done before. And neither does anyone else. I do know that where there are large areas of land that were there have been nuclear accidents in the past where no one is allowed to live displacing large populations for as much as 30 years(so far) in both Ukraine and Japan. It is just too radioactive to be safe.

Are we setting things up to have just such a large exclusion zone in Carlsbad NM?(or somewhere else, due to a transport accident?)

I don’t know. Possibly.

Is it worth the risk just to make electricity to run hair dryers, X boxes, and leave refrigerator doors open? I don’t think so. I think we have better and much safer ways of doing the same thing.